Security flaws in a number of market-leading mobile point of sale (MPoS) devices could leave customers open to fraudulent charging and vulnerable payment methods, according to researchers. Leigh-Anne Galloway and Tim Yunusov, researchers from security firm Positive Technologies, looked at seven MPoS devices popular in the US and Europe, including devices sold by Square, iZettle, PayPal and SumUp.

Capital On Tap has secured £90 million in debt funding from M&G Investments and Triple Point Investment Management, along with a £50 million debt line from Citibank and Pollen Street Capital. The startup is not publicly disclosing its valuation, but it has now raised over £30 million of equity and £200 million of debt to date.

The Bank of England (BoE) is looking to explore the demand for introducing synchronised settlement to the renewed Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) service. It has issued a call for interest from FinTech firms to help investigate the potential and understand the design implications for organisations which would interface with the system.

Moneyhub has secured Payment Initiation Services Provider authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority, a step further from its current Account Information Services Provider status. The financial management platform has also launched an application programming interface (API) gateway, which it described as a ‘one stop shop’ of personalised, permission-based, financial data sources, giving development teams access to data streams to help build innovative customer solutions.

Norwegian banks Sbanken, Sparebanken Vest, and Sparebanken Sogn og Fjordane have joined forces to let customers view accounts from across all three in either’s online banking platform. The initiative is set to be rolled out well in advance of next autumn’s mandated introduction of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), giving the banks a head start in the FinTech-led account aggregation space.

The World Bank has chosen Commonwealth Bank (CBA) to be the sole arranger of the first global bond to be created, allocated, transferred and managed using blockchain technology. The Australian dollar denominated ‘bond-i’, or Blockchain Offered New Debt Instrument, has been developed with input from the investor community, including Northern Trust, QBE and the Treasury Corporation of Victoria.

Millions of fax machines could be vulnerable to malicious hackers using booby-trapped image data to gain access to internal networks, security researchers have found.
Yaniv Balmas and Eyal Itkin, security researchers at CheckPoint, a US software company, found that the owners of more than 300 million active fax numbers could be leaving themselves open to so-called ‘faxploitation’ attacks.

INTL FCStone’s London-based Precious Metals Division has started using Paxos’ technology to automate trade confirmations, reduce errors and secure instantaneous reconciliation. The startup’s service will confirm all of the trades INTL FCStone executes on a daily basis, eliminating thousands of manual tasks every day, while improving operational precision.

A combination of incumbent insurers wanting to update their propositions, and startups realising they require help scaling up, means the InsurTech space is ripe for partnership. This is according to the Association of British Insurers’ assistant director and head of strategy, data and analytics Matt Cullen, who suggested that the market is finally getting closer to making technology pay.